Disturbed Headlines WWF New York, with Glassjaw, From Zero, 6gig; Stew at Knitting Factory, Two Nights After Czechs Psi Vojaci
My favorite moments of a hard rock concert are when I get pinned up in the first three rows, pinned so tightly that all I can do is sway with the crowd, surrounded by human flesh. If the band is good enough, and the audience is good enough, I can almost return to the womb, stuffed under the arms of two headbangers.
There were about 30 seconds of this reverie at the Disturbed/Glassjaw/From Zero/6gig show at WWF New York. The rest of the night was, you know, decent.
6gig came out around 8 p.m.?there was a band before them, but they were such atrocious Sevendust ripoffs that they don't need their name mentioned. 6gig was the most promising bunch of the night, blending arty rap-metal riffs with actual melodies. A red-haired kid named Walter Craven, who looked a lot like Static-X singer Wayne Static, fronted the group. He had two mics, one for superfluous distorted vocals and one for his natural yelling, which was notably on key. His guitar player sang great harmonies, his drummer drummed, and the band came correct with real tunes: their opener, with the line, "I keep my emotions to myself," had the hook that ruled my head when the evening was over.
6gig also had the only hot female fans there?a blonde and brunette bopping in the front row, hands tight on the barricade.
"What's this band's name?" I asked them between songs. The blonde ignored me. The brunette smiled and handed over a packet of 6gig merchandise.
"Are you their girlfriends?" I asked. No response.
6gig got offstage at 8:30 and From Zero came on?another bunch of Static-X look-alikes. (Who knew that Wayne Static would be a male fashion archetype?) These Chicago natives played tight but forgettable nu metal, their best moments coming when singer Jett injected dub-style rants into his vocals. Jamaican dub metal? This I can see. From Zero should concentrate on it.
Glassjaw followed?straight-edge emo-core from Long Island. They worked the local crowd better than anyone that night, yelling "Long Island!" as they came onstage, spawning a hellish mosh pit, and even getting kids to stick their fingers up in the "L.I." sign (I bet you can figure it out).
I liked Glassjaw's look?singer Daryl Palumbo did the frail rock star thing perfectly, with his tiny frame, square glasses and loose t-shirt. He vented himself as only a 20-year-old virgin can. Unfortunately, during all of the band's 40-minute set, I heard not one song. Not even a hook. Glassjaw is tight on their debut, Everything You Wanted to Know About Silence, so I don't know why they fell apart live. I'd like to think it's something more interesting than lack of practice.
The band did get bonus points for having the evening's best closing gimmick. As their final song ended, the musicians fled the stage a la That Thing You Do, leaving lead hottie Daryl on his knees, screeching this phrase into his mic over and over again: "Pack up your shit! And leave! And take my memories of her with you! Pack up your shit! And leave! And take-my-memories-of-her-with-you!" He did that for a good minute, before shrieking: "You're just a party girrrrrl, like alllll the others, and you don't mean shit to me!" Then he flung down his mic. End of set.
A good percentage of the crowd exited with Glassjaw, apparently having had their fill of stifled maleness. That's too bad, because headliners Disturbed put on a good show.
Hailing from Chicago, Disturbed plays nu metal with a clever twist. Whereas their peers employ rapped verses with screeched, almost-melodic choruses, Disturbed flips the formula around. The verse has an optional melody and the chorus is always a staccato chant, like, "Get down/'A get down with the sickness," or "Look in my face/Stare in my soul/I begin to stupefy," from their breakthrough hit, "Stupify." Vocalist Dave Draiman is the main attraction; he sounds like no one else, especially when he does his Donald Duck scream. It's best transcribed as "Rrrrak!" and it appears in nearly all Disturbed songs?e.g., "All the people in the left wing/ Rrrrak!/ All the people in the right wing/Rrrrak!" (from "Stupify").
The Disturbed power trio?guitarist Dan Donegan, bassist Fuzz and drummer Mike Wengren?set up their equipment in plain view, while Draiman did an offstage sound check. Great idea, because the money shot of the night was Draiman's entrance: he strutted out in a full black bodysuit with silver buckles. All I could think of was Jason Alexander doing Rob Halford. The band launched into "The Sickness," the title track from their surprisingly popular CD, and rocked un-self-consciously for the rest of the night.
All of Disturbed's songs were exactly the same, with Draiman parading about like a metal god of old, chanting, "You are my en-e-my/My mortal en-e-my," or something similar. The mosh pit wasn't as hard as it had been for Glassjaw, but it throbbed. At one point I saw a huge frat kid lift up his girlfriend and hold her?one hand on each ass-cheek?for an entire song. I thought that was sweet.
During Disturbed's closer?"Stupify," of course?the crowd nearly crushed me, and I threw my hands in the air and had my Big Metal Moment, looking Draiman in the eyes and flashing devil horns at him as he croaked, "All la gente in the barrio/Rrrrak!" Rock indeed.
I'm not going to buy any of these bands' albums, with the possible exception of 6gig's just-released Tincan Experiment, but they thrashed hard; sometimes that's all you need. WWF New York at Times Square, by the way, is a great-sounding venue, and I look forward to blowing my eardrums there in the future.
Ned Vizzini
Anyway, that's all Stew's cross to bear. I don't care about racial divides in pop music. I'm just looking to have a pleasant evening out at a nightclub. It's understood that the odds are against me. For one thing, it's the first night of CMJ. To make matters worse, I'm heading off to a show at the Knitting Factory.
Now, we all know things are pretty tense down at the Knitting Factory. People aren't getting paid, and the employees are getting plenty nervous. The good news is that most of those lackeys are proud anarchists. Let them starve in the streets. I hope former doorman M. Doughty is having a good laugh while doing massive lines of cocaine up in his penthouse. And you'd be hoping the same if you had to see the Knitting Factory in such a sad state.
But first, let's be fair. This night, the Knitting Factory is dealing with the double trauma of a John Scofield audience and the opening night of CMJ. That's a very demanding situation. Still, there's no excuse for how the surly guy working the line is treating geeks both old and young. In a typical moment, one gawky kid tries to ask an innocent question. "Who are you here to see?" demands Mr. Douchebag. "I'm here to see Franklin Bruno, but I'm not sure which room he's playing in." The burly cretin leads the guy over to the sandwich board where the acts are usually listed. "Well," says the big fat creep, "why don't we learn to read?" But, as with his paycheck, the joke is on the employee. It seems the people at the Knitting Factory are too busy digging food out of dumpsters to bother writing down the evening's acts by name. There's no reason why this poor kid should know where he's heading.
This doesn't bother Mr. Douchebag, though. He just makes more snide remarks, and strolls away to go bother some others already in line. The kid should walk out in disgust, but he's really interested in seeing Franklin Bruno. (I never said this geek was a sympathetic figure.) Anyway, I tell him that the Knitting Factory staff is just pissed because they aren't getting paid for their slavery to art.
Maybe the kid would have figured this out by himself. It's apparent that there's something wrong when it takes a half hour to move a line of about 10 people. Ticket-takers get awfully sluggish when they're deprived of vital nutrients. I finally make it to the front of the line, and find?for the third time in a row at this club?that I'm not on the publicist's list. I buy a ticket, and wonder if I'm really covering for some employee's late-night dinner over at Fresco Tortilla. But who cares? I'm just anxious to get into the downstairs area. After a half hour, I'm desperate to be anywhere.
That said, it's a miserable environment downstairs. I'm hoping to see some familiar faces, but the place is pretty empty?which makes it all the funnier that it took 30 minutes to get in. It seems most people were smart enough to attend the night before, when the talented Jenifer Jackson was the opening act. Tonight, it's some truly pathetic 50-year-old guy who's just bad enough to impress the CMJ attendees. He's wearing the t-shirt of another incompetent musician, so maybe it's all some high concept.
In any case, it's an absurdly long time before Stew finally makes it onto the stage. He confirms my earlier fears with his opening announcement: "Last night was a really great show, with a lot of adults in the audience." Stew lets out a sigh. "Now we've got people from CMJ." Then he launches into a song from Guest Host, his fine new solo album. There really aren't many people writing material as intelligent and tuneful as Stew. Unfortunately, all the songs are delivered in a strangely sarcastic tone. Stew also talks a lot between and during songs, just to make sure the audience knows that he's serious in his disdain. Fortunately, Stew's also a really clever bastard. The songs suffer, but the audience is won over by some goddamn funny lines. That's enough to put me in a happy mood. I get to see Stew, his anger puts a new spin on some of my favorite songs and I don't have to worry about where my next paycheck is coming from.
Sometimes, it does a person good to visit the less fortunate.
J.R. Taylor
In 1978, Psi Vojaci (translated as "Dog Soldiers" from the Thomas Berger novel Little Big Man) were a bunch of teenagers who put a band together and started playing the dissident circuit at a pivotal moment in Czech history. Havel and several hundred Czech intellectuals signed the Charter 77 manifesto protesting suppression of Czechoslovakian rights the year before; the Charter gained momentum throughout the 80s and finally culminated in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that put the Charter's dissidents in power and Havel at its head.
In the 80s Psi Vojaci had no choice but to be forced underground. Before the revolution, all Czech bands were made to submit their songs to Soviet Tipper-types who would scour the lyrics for unsavory (un-Soviet) political messages. Songs that didn't make it through were subsequently banned from the radio and all other national distribution, creating a strong underground that chugged along through bootlegs and samizdat zines. Psi Vojaci, who were officially banned from doing public appearances by 1980, never had a chance of making it past the censors.
I don't know all the songs they've written in the past two decades, but the lyrics I do know, the majority of which were written by lead singer Filip Topol's brother, the writer Jachym, are vague, associative little prose-poems reminiscent of Leonard Cohen or maybe Charles Simic. Not exactly hard-hitting political stuff, but then anything that didn't drip with that great failed Russian experiment Social Realism made the Soviets uneasy. Added to the censor's disapprobation was that Jachym's and Filip's father, Josef, was a well-known playwright, poet and friend of Havel who was a pivotal member of the dissident movement. His position in the underground effectively barred the brothers from going to the university or getting decent jobs. Jachym puttered around as a construction worker, spent some time in jail and founded several samizdat magazines, eventually gaining respectable international recognition in the mid-90s for his novel Sestra (translated here as City Sister Silver), a not-bad Will Self/Pagan Kennedy book about young Czechs. For his part, Filip, as lead singer of Psi Vojaci, was interrogated by the secret police throughout the 70s and 80s until the revolution, and, as the story goes, national fame.
Havel's support of the music scene is legendary. Havel was supposedly so taken with the Velvet Underground that he named the revolution after them. (And when Milos Forman was looking to cast an actress to play Flynt's wife in The People vs. Larry Flynt, Havel's the one who suggested Courtney Love.) The two biggest underground bands of those decades, Vojaci and the Plastic People of the Universe, were clearly influenced by VU, particularly in their experimentation with those very-VU flat sounds and theatrics.
Something nice about the Czechs: there isn't that solid, solemn demarcation between the disciplines. Havel started out writing strange, Kafka-influenced plays about robots; Filip wrote lyrics that incorporated German medieval poetry and Plath's Ariel; Vojaci and Plastic People played in conjunction with other artists/writers/musicians and performed for them?the Factory, without the ennui. As a Czech diplomat said to me: "We're such a small country, holed in on all sides, that the music is our nationalism." At a time when politics in music has been rendered, if not useless, then embarrassing, a teenage thing?"Ohio" and Dylan to "41 Shots" and Zack De La Rocha?Vojaci and other bands of the time played music that people liked unironically.
I didn't get a chance to hear them play when I was living in Prague '96-'97, but I couldn't avoid them either; their name was spray-painted on almost every graffiti wall I saw along with the usual anarchy symbols and political slogans.
They played the Knitting Factory a couple of weeks ago during their first U.S. appearance, sponsored by the Czech Embassy in DC. At three gigs, they clearly weren't planning a U.S. invasion. I got to the show and realized how little proselytizing was on tap. Most everyone was speaking Czech, except for a few stragglers left over from the Drums & Tuba show that played earlier and a radio guy who was looking for bootlegs of the Plastic People. It's difficult to find Psi Vojaci CDs in the States since they don't have U.S. distribution, and they weren't selling any at the show. (But you can e-mail Romek Hanzlik at amp@ti.cz and he'll send them to you from Prague.)
Czechs who live in the city, unlike the Poles or Russians or Ukrainians, don't have a geographical center here except for a "Bohemia" beer hall or two in Astoria that may or may not cater to its intended audience, so everyone was happily kiss-kissing and introducing themselves. "I just hope they're good," a Czech guy I started talking to said to me. The show was running late, the Czech women wobbled up and down the stairs in high heels to fix their makeup in the bathroom, the Czech fratboys made guttural drunk noises and grabbed each other by the shoulders, and then Topol came out. He was slight, and with his ambivalent combover he didn't initially come across like a frontman. But then he sat behind the piano after a few words of introduction and started pivoting on his hips and doing amazing vocal things, growls that turned to whispers and shrieks. The music's indescribable, very dark and theatrical. Besides Topol, who sings and plays piano, there's only a sax player and a drummer, and no guitar or bass.
For a band that's been doing it for decades, playing the same songs again and again (the fate of an old band), they performed with an intensity I've rarely seen in live shows. Psi Vojaci's a band you go to see perform. They play music that leaves an almost unbearable ache in your chest, honest music you rarely hear outside the blues. The guy I was talking to at the bar sat next to me and sloppily translated the lyrics as Filip sang them, something like: "The woman at the bar tells me I look like James Dean/She's smoking fancy cigarettes/I go home as the sun's coming up and people are going to work/I don't want to look like James Dean/And I don't want to smoke fancy cigarettes.../I want to go home."
Psi Vojaci's website (in Czech) with MP3 downloads is www.psivojaci.cz.
Daria Vaisman